Ted Penny

Source: Canberra Times

Ted was the first Western Australian qualified Indigenous
teacher and the Western Australian state secretary of the Federal
Council for Aboriginal Advancement in 1964. He went to Sydney for
the launch of the national petition for a referendum in 1962 and
was active in the West in support of a Yes vote. Here he compares
conditions for Aboriginal people across the states in the
1960s.

WA and Queensland were perhaps a little worse than the others.
It's hard to say. The people in Sydney and Melbourne have always
been much more active, and so you hear more and it would sound as
if it's worse because people are having a lot more to say. But I
think in the beginning, people were much quieter in WA. That
changes and there are a lot of people who are more vocal about it
afterwards. But I suspect WA perhaps would have been as bad as
any.

Ted helped people to understand what it meant to be an
Aboriginal Western Australian in the early 1960s when he told
people what happened when he decided to get married, 'I told Mum,
but I asked the Commissioner (of Native Welfare).' He also pointed
out that in his journey from Port Hedland to Canberra his status
changed from being Aboriginal to not being Aboriginal and then back
again as he crossed state borders.

One of the big things too was the definition of 'Aboriginal',
and it was different in each state. So you could become an
Aboriginal or a non-Aboriginal as you moved from state to state.
And when I came through, we stopped in Melbourne. I came with a
fellow and we went into a hotel, had our lunch down there, and it
was legal for me to go in. And I went on to Canberra and I became
an Aboriginal again, under the law, but I was never anything
but an Aboriginal! And then later on, they brought in a
legal definition, that I think has always applied to most people
anyway; that if you know you're Aboriginal, you're Aboriginal, and
that's all there is to it.

And that's always been of concern to me in the way that that's
been put across as, you know 'How Aboriginal are you?' No-one says
to you: 'How Australian are you?' And the further back you can
trace the generations of Australians, then the more Australian they
are going to say you are. Now, the Aboriginal history goes back,
back, back but the further you come away from there, they say
you're less Aboriginal. It works in the reverse. Okay, so your
grandparents were Aboriginal, but you've got a - no-one said
anything about the mixture of what you are in Australian.

Sue: Has that got better, do you think? Do you think people are
still as ignorant or has it improved a bit?

Ted: Well, you see it depends. The people that you mix with
don't normally say those things whenever it comes up. But a lot of
people will still say: 'What part Aboriginal are you?' 'Well now, I
think, my finger is', you know. I often say to them: 'Well, what
part Australian are you?' 'Oh I'm a third generation Australian.'
'Well, what were your parents?' 'Well, one came from Germany...'
'So you're half German?' 'No, no, no, no'.

In 1998 Ted received the Barry Hayward Award for Outstanding
Achievement for his work as Coordinator of Aboriginal Education in
the Pilbara.

Source: The extracts on this page are from an
interview with Ted Penny conducted by Sue Taffe on 27 May 1997